Ben Bowyang
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Ben Bowyang was an Australian newspaper comic strip, first published in the Melbourne Herald on Saturday, 7 October 1933, created by the cartoonist Alex Gurney, that followed the misadventures of two archetypical Australian bushmen, Ben Bowyang and his mate, Bill Smith, of "Gunn's Gully": characters that first appeared in the humorous Herald columns written during the 1920s and 1930s by C. J. Dennis.
Ben Bowyang, a philosophical farmer from "Gunn's Gully" first appeared — as the author of "A Letter from the Bush" — in C.J. Dennis's regular Herald column,[1] The Mooch of Life on 12 June 1922.[2]
When I was a boy the bowyang was worn by
most bush-workers, and by labourers generally.
It is never seen today. The bowyang — in case
you do not know — is a strap worn just below
the knee of the trousers. Its purpose was to take
the drag from [the] braces or waist-belt, and to
lift the trouser-ends well clear of the ground. And
very comfortably it performed this service, too. …
Bernard Cronin (1952).[3]
The characters, Ben Bowyang and Bill Smith, featured in so many of the comical letters published in Dennis' columns, and became such favourites among the Herald's readers that, a year later, the Herald's resident caricaturist Samuel Garnet Wells pretended to have visited Gunn's Gully — "Correspondents have frequently asked what Ben Bowyang and Bill Smith are like. This is Wells's impression of them after a visit to Gunns Gully" — and presented 'caricatures' of the fictional pair, as if they were, indeed, real people.[4]
Ten years later, based upon Dennis' columns and Well's (1923) caricatures, Gurney (at the time also a Herald employee) went on to create the characters for his successful comic strip.[5]
